Catalysing Ocean Finance UNDP Publication

The world’s oceans and coastal areas are an integral part of life on earth. They are under significant threat, whether that be from pollution, over-exploita­tion, habitat loss, invasive species, or climate change.

Catalysing Ocean Finance demonstrates that, far from being an intractable problem, sustainable ocean management could become a successful legacy of today’s generation of decision-makers. It shows how the challenges facing the ocean stem from widely understood market and policy failures - failures which can be addressed through the application of appropriate mixes of market and policy instruments.

Over the past twenty years, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the GEF have successfully developed a range of strategic planning tools aimed at assisting governments to put in place enabling policy environments to catalyse investment for restoring and protecting the marine environment. In several cases, catalysed public and private financial flows have exceeded the initial GEF investment several hundred times. In some cases, these instruments have helped to shift sizeable ocean industries, such as shipping and tuna fisheries, to a more environmentally sustainable path.

Catalysing Ocean Finance (Volumes I & II) takes stock of how effective these instruments have been in helping countries to address challenges facing the oceans and explore how they could be successfully scaled up. It estimates that an initial public investment – on the order of $5 billion over the next ten to twenty years – could be sufficient to catalyse several hundred billion dollars of public and private invest­ment, and thereby foster global transformation of ocean markets towards sustainability.